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I’ll begin with a story. Some years ago, when the concern about the impact of cable-laying on tree roots was at its height, I kept a close eye on operations in the area of south London where I live, trying to ensure that operators were aware of the issues and that they were observing the National Joint Utility Group guidelines on work near trees. On one occasion, I went up to a workman digging a trench in the road and asked him, in effect - what about the trees? “Oh that’s all right, guv,” he replied. “They’re staying.”
In a limited sense, he was right. In the longer term I’m not so sure. I don’t mean by that the damage to the trees and their prospects of survival, more the fact that cable has supplanted tree roots as the network of choice in city streets – so that instead of watching tree roots when you’re laying cable you now have to watch what tree you plant in case you damage the wires. And that of course enormously limits what trees you can plant, and where.
So there’s a symbolic level to that story. Maybe we can hold it in our minds for what it says about the modern urban environment – the gulf between policy and practice, the skills levels of practitioners etc.
It’s also a way of asking how, and if, messages get across and thus what we are doing here. Do we need to be talking about greener cities? Hasn’t the message finally sunk in after all those years of shouting from the sidelines – isn’t it now mainstream? Just think of the plethora of reports and initiatives in recent years – from Rogers to Prescott, from task forces to urban summits to green gateways, from Green Space to Cabe Space. Isn’t everybody at it nowadays – greening the city, that is?
Those were the questions we asked ourselves when wondering whether to prolong the life of the Urban Wildlife Partnership. I guess the fact that we’re here today and that the UWP has morphed into the UWN suggests what our answer was. Just because lots of people – lots more people – are talking about greening the city and greener cities doesn’t mean its happening. Indeed, what policy makers say and what men with spades and chainsaws, or come to that developers and designers and open space managers, do, often bear little relationship to each other. In many ways I think cities are greying rather than greening – I think we’re losing many of the gains we made in the past, particularly in the 70s and 80s.
That’s certainly what I see when comparing urban landscapes past and present that I know – I see loss of green space either through new development or development creep or hard-surfacing, I see streets being canyonised, I see low-rise being replaced by high-rise, I see parks being managed like domestic interiors, all nice and neat and tidy, trees reduced in size, pruned into lampposts or banished altogether, fear of crime or fear of fear of crime and anxiety about health and safety developing into obsessive-compulsive disorders, like a social disease, and leading to the large-scale trashing of the understorey. And to those who don’t see these things, I have a humble suggestion. Maybe they should get out more.
Now I’m not trying to be flippant when I say that since I’m fairly convinced that one of the reasons as a culture we are disconnected from and in denial about environmental issues - and why it’s also possible for Policyworld, to sound like Terry Pratchett for a moment, to be disjoined from Spade or Chainsaw World, so that we may TALK green cities but we don’t necessarily DO them - is that Policyworld spends all its life indoors.
Now I could produce evidence to back up these impressionistic responses – in London, for example, loss of Metropolitan Open Land or playing fields etc – but I don’t need to because the fact is, it’s Government policy, either de iure or de facto. By which I mean compact cities, brownfield redevelopment, urban “regeneration” – I put the word advisedly in quote marks – and population growth.
If you have a situation in which the population of the UK is set to grow by some 6 million by 2031- a 10 per cent increase - in which we are all going to grow more affluent - and therefore spatially more expansive and demanding – in which the bulk of development is destined for a tightly demarcated urban envelope and in which cities and therefore urban regeneration are seen in primarily economic terms, you will not get greener cities. You cannot. It is almost, dare one say it, physically impossible.
What you will get, and what we are getting, is ever higher-density development, running directly counter to what we know from endless surveys most people want, with green space increasingly shoehorned precariously into the urban fabric. Recently I even heard one landscape designer arguing that we ought to forget about private gardens – because they were ”unsustainable” (I quote) - and just have bits of communal green space - which for those with memories will recall Le Corbusier and La Ville Radieuse and we know where that led. 60s high-rise, that’s where. It’s also been said that some of the private gardens now being built are so small NHBC regulations forbid the planting of trees on them.
So you may get green roofs and bat bricks and bird boxes but, wonderful though these are, they are no substitute for large areas where wildlife can prosper and people can genuinely reconnect with nature. And cities where people cannot do this – cannot renew themselves psychically - will not be places where people will want to live, not leave, and since that is the Government’s definition of sustainable, they will be, by definition, unsustainable. Hence it’s not surprising we’re starting to hearing about the dash for trash and the slums of the future – references to the housing we are now building. In my view, compact cities, certainly as they are being interpreted and implemented, are too much about technics and energy use and not enough about human need. Just like high-rise building in the 60s, they are the current orthodoxy, they are rarely questioned and they presage, in my view, another high-rise-like planning disaster.
Now I appreciate that the picture just painted applies more to the south and east than to the north and west and that there are key differences in terms of land availability and development pressures. But I don’t think that alters the basic thrust of what I’m saying. Indeed, speaking as a Mancunian born and bred, I look at places like Piccadilly Gardens and it’s quite clear it has changed for the worse. The point is that this is the policy context, the big picture, we’re operating in and it explains, in my view, why there is a pressing need for a body like the UWN – to challenge the orthodoxy. But there are other more elusive factors at play that are blocking what I would regard as genuinely greener cities, whether in the North or the South, and they are all quite difficult to resolve. Let me try to enumerate them, as briefly as possible. .
First, health and safety. Everyone knows about this. Anything that offers a taste of the wild or the rural in local authority greenspace fills the municipal mind with foreboding. Cabe Space has done a good job in publicising this issue. But whether we really live in a compensation culture or only think we do, the result is the same – a mistrust of many of the features that make landscapes exciting. Not least for kids. Somehow, we have to think our way through to an intelligent place beyond the present nonsense.
Second, crime, and fear of. As most people are now aware, this is having a blighting effect on urban landscapes. In particular the idea of sight lines has got out of control – unspeakable trashing of valuable habitat is done in its name. Recent council plans for a woodland I know in south London would involve widening paths and mowing the edges alongside to create cordons sanitaires to a point where these alone, forgetting any open areas, would occupy 20 per cent of the woodland area. On both this and health and safety, we need more intelligence, more education, more awareness, more leadership from open space managers – not just a knee-jerk capitulation to a misinformed but sometimes vociferous lobby.
Third, over-design. Whether it’s garden makeovers or heritage lottery schemes, there’s a fundamental human desire to imprint its own identity on the landscape. One aspect of this is the tidiness culture, which is the default setting in all bureaucracies. Partly this is to do with perceptions of order and chaos – hence “self-seeded” becomes a term of abuse - partly to do with the way most large organisations operate – the safety-first approach. In my view, it’s getting worse – not least because of TV makeover programmes and vested commercial interests.
Fourth, and leading on from this, is that new shibboleth, inclusiveness, and its related sub-shibboleth, access. It sounds great in theory - in practice, it too often means a bums-on-seats approach to green spaces, which in turn means more bread and circuses, more “facilities” and events, more usage, greater numbers and more dumbed-down, lowest-common- denominator landscapes. And somewhere during this process, a tipping point appears in which urban green space ceases to offer those very qualities most people want from it – who wants a wood that made up of sightlines?.
Fifth is a quality that’s hard to describe but could perhaps be labelled anthropocentrism or ecological blindness. Too often, when thinking about green space design, we think pictures rather than cycles or webs. I think it was JBS Haldane who remarked that God had an inordinate fondness for beetles, which was a way of saying that bugs and beetles and bacteria underpin the diversity of life. Yet when things get that small we lose sight of them – they become uncharismatic microfauna – and we don’t design for them. In biodiversity terms, it’s a hugely expensive loss of vision. And, to repeat, we live in a culture where anthropocentrism is in danger of becoming terminal.
Sixth, we still suffer from that variant of bipolarity disorder known as the urban-rural divide - a kind of schizoid one-eyedness bound up with Romanticism and the history of urbanisation, enshrined in the planning system, which makes us think of city and country as separate realms. The things that you do in “the countryside” or in country parks you cannot do in cities or in urban green space. That, too, is a recipe for dull landscapes.
Seventh, the reinvention of the wheel. Many of the things I have just said could have been said, and were being said, 20-25 years ago when the urban wildlife “movement” began. Lots of people in influential positions listened then, nodded – and moved on. Institutional memory and permanent institutional capacity has been slow to build. You build a relationship with a parks manager, and then he finds a better job in waste management. And though there HAVE been larger-scale institutional gains – we have Groundwork, for example we have community forests, we have Cabe Space, we have the potential of the Land Restoration Trust – I’m not sure these are paralleled by a corresponding growth in grassroots awareness. But I AM sure that such gains as there have been are having to contend with powerful new political, social and cultural agendas – housing, economic regeneration, demographics, health, safety, crime, etc. And because of these new factors I’m beginning think the REALITY of greener cities, as opposed to the CONCEPT, may be under a greater threat now than at any time in the last half century.
I’m sorry if this sounds somewhat negative. But if you don’t criticise, you don’t learn. As to what we do about it, that’s what today’s partly about. Some suggestions are outlined in the manifesto for green cities in the delegates pack. To summarise my own view, I would say we need to expand and strengthen institutional capacity and, we need to reform and/or make crystal clear the rights and duties of both public bodies AND citizens in relation to safety and crime. Maybe we even need a new rights for nature law – safeguarding nature’s right to be natural. We certainly need more inspired neglect. We also need to strengthen the research base on human-nature interactions and we need to bang on endlessly about the links between nature, natural richness - biodiversity, if you like - health, well-being and the care of the soul – that’s s-o-u-l. The battle for greener cities is won first inside minds: the physical green spaces come later.
We will discuss this in the workshops later. But first two cautionary notes.
The first is particularly relevant to new urban green spaces – the spaces being created in the various growth corridors. In terms of what one might call naturalness – defined as nature being left alone to get on with it - there’s not much in the UK today to beat brownfield land. That’s why so many brownfield sites are so biodiverse. And also highly atmospheric. Take over the job of managing them from nature, take the job of managing anything natural away from nature, and, with the best will in the world, it’s hard to avoid bringing all the fear of crime, health and safety and other ideological baggage I have been describing with you. To rephrase Ian McHarg, Design With Nature becomes Design By Organisation or, worse, Design by Committee.
The best recent example of that I know is a wonderful Caucasian elm that was condemned to lopping or felling by three separate arboriculturalists - even though they acknowledged it was healthy and vigorous. The reasons? They couldn’t or wouldn’t guarantee there was no risk. And it’s instructive in this context to remind ourselves that some of the best large-scale natural landscapes created in Britain since the war were built by the New Town Corporations – organisations which were (1) unitary i.e. not partnerships or flexible delivery mechanisms and (2) not noted for their democratic nature.
The second point brings us full circle. When we were discussing the death or resurrection of the UWN, a member of the UWN executive pointed out that there was a role for us because, and I quote, “campaigning has almost become a dirty word.”
What he meant by this, I think, and it certainly chimes with my own experience, not least of the Heritage Lottery Fund, is that the spread of partnership working and flexible delivery mechanisms, coupled with the grants and subsidies and project funding that now underpin this, mean that we may have created an urban environmental version of what Marcuse described in the 60s as The System – a kind of amorphous interlocking bureaucracy or quasi-bureaucracy or parastatal organisation in which nobody really wants to rock the boat. Or to put it another way, yesterday’s boat-rockers have become today’s professionalised oarsmen – anxious, too anxious, not to row out of step with the others.
The corollary of which, of course, is that if you want to rock some boat, or you think at least that boats deserve the occasional challenging oscillation, you could do a lot worse than join the Urban Wildlife Network.
